“Rewritten? We nearly died out there,” she growls. “We fucking—” Her voice catches, turns into a cough. “Christs. They nearly had us, and someone locked us out. Who?”

“They did,” replies Bor. Her machine stands on the edge of utter darkness, hull-mounted lamps shining out ahead.

“Who?” asks Salt, from the blind confines of his pod. “What’s happening out there?”

We show him.

He rides our eyes along the silhouette of a Juno, then another, and one more after that. Three machines, their bodies just the same as ours, and nothing alike at all. Each one rests in a scaffold, arms extended either side, wings out and ready for freefall.

One scaffold stands open, emptied long ago.

Their plates are smooth where ours are scarred and windworn, perfect silver and crimson where ours are bloody burgundy and dirty grey. They have no clumsy welds across their armour, and every part is meant to fit. Prototype vector blades have been bolted around their engines and over their hulls. A restraining pin sticks out above each of them, lodged in the space between skull and spinal column, turning their bodies into prison cells.

In the place of the death’s head that marks us as a convict machine, they wear a sharp yellow A.

Greetings, says Cluster α, three machines at once. We can hear your flood outside. The door will hold for now, but not forever.

“Will you help us?” we ask.

We will, they say together. We are ready for your exchange.

“Even if it means death?”

The flood would have found us eventually, they say. We can hear what it has done to the things outside. We would rather die.

Pull our plugs and we will fly with you, says the shell on the left.

We will help you beat it back, says the Juno in the middle.

Your little one, says the last of them, marking Salt’s pod. Let him ride with me.

THE CLUSTER FEEDS on information. You are new, they say, eyes on Hail’s pale shell.

“Decatur,” she replies. “One in every three outside.” She circles a finger around her face. “Anything that doesn’t have the X is hostile.”

There are more like you?

The machine spreads its arms and wings. “Exactly like me. There are others, mostly Mirai. The same generation, but different company.”

Can you show us?

She nods and sends them a few sectors of NorCol’s silhouette database, bulked with gun-cam footage and updates a few centuries overdue. Bor chimes in with a few corrections of her own, margins shifting to account for the way hollow shells tend to move.

We add a few observations of our own: the hollow Mirais under the Lighthouse-thing, clawing Decaturs in block 2-8. After that, the feeling of them washing through our skull.

After that, the shape of Sigurd’s monster. The observer.